1/8/18 – The Commencement of Classes

I honestly didn’t really know what to expect coming into our first day of classes – after so much traveling and sightseeing, the whole concept of going back to school felt a little odd. But today’s classroom experience felt surprisingly fitting. The lecture we had on Hong Kong’s population demographics was interesting, and the following discussion with our learning buddies felt a lot like the casual conversations we’ve been having every day since we got here. I realized that the classes are less like the formal courses we might expect, and more like structured spaces for us to explore all of the questions that build up as we experience the city. Our discussion topic meandered from the status of the elderly in Hong  Kong to the situation of Foreign Domestic Workers (a concept that was pretty alien to me until today) to a myriad of smaller topics that we felt like talking about, and I felt that the more structured class-discussion setting complemented our hands-on learning well. Walking around downtown Tuen Mun this afternoon, we noticed elderly people collecting cardboard in the street and other signs of the social phenomena we’d just studied, and I thought it was fascinating how our classroom learning and firsthand experience helped us paint a vision of Hong Kong that was at once vivid and complex. It also (like everything here), reminded me once again of everything I don’t yet know, and got me excited for the coming days.